Cold case: The murder of Louis Allen

This story was first published April 10, 2011. It was updated on June 20, 2011.

Five years ago, the FBI announced that it was reopening more than 100 unsolved murder cases from the civil rights era of the 1950s and 60s. The goal of the Cold Case Initiative was to try and mete out justice in what seemed to be racially motivated killings that were never prosecuted.

Not many 50-year-old cold cases ever get solved. Memories fade, evidence is lost, witnesses and suspects die or disappear, but that's not the case in the death of Louis Allen, a mostly forgotten, but historically significant murder that helped bring thousands of white college students to Mississippi in the Freedom Summer of 1964.

As we first reported in April, the murder is still unsolved, but the case has never quite gone away, because the chief suspect is very much alive and walking the streets of a town called Liberty.

Reporting on an unsolved Mississippi murder
Forty seven years after the murder of Louis Allen, "60 Minutes" goes to Liberty, Miss. in search of his killer.

Liberty, Miss. is a small rural logging town not far from the Louisiana border. The FBI believes that some people there have been keeping a dark secret for nearly 50 years, from one of the ugliest periods in the state's history.

It was a time when civil rights activists were beaten and arrested, when state, and local politics were controlled by all-white citizens' councils, and when people like Louis Allen were murdered in cold blood and without redress.

Cynthia Deitle, a 15-year veteran of the FBI's civil rights division, was, until recently, in charge of the Cold Case Initiative. She keeps a photo of Allen on her desk.

Asked why, she told "60 Minutes" correspondent Steve Kroft, "The case bothers me. I feel like we failed, and not just the FBI, but law enforcement."

Of the 100 unsolved racially motivated murders she has been charged with investigating, none has been more promising or frustrating than Allen's.

Got a tip or information about the Louis Allen case or any other civil rights era cold case? Send us an e-mail at 60m@cbsnews.com.

"Somebody knows something. Some husband came home with bloody clothing. Someone got drunk in a bar and said what he was doing last night. Someone knows something," Deitle said.

But in the early 1960s, people in and around Liberty knew to keep their mouths shut. A violent chapter of the Ku Klux Klan used cross burnings, abductions and murder to enforce the doctrine of white supremacy and to intimidate the black population, most of which lived in shacks with no electricity or plumbing, and were not allowed to vote.

Civil rights leaders like Robert Moses, who came south to help them register, were frequently the target of violence.

"Liberty was not a place that I liked to go," Moses remembered.

Asked why, he told Kroft, "Because it was a place where you weren't safe if you were doing voter registration work."

Extra: Will this case be solved?
Extra: His father's murder
Extra: News of the murder

It was in Liberty that Moses met Louis Allen, a rough-hewn World War II veteran who walked proud and was not afraid to stand up for himself. He ran a small timber business, was one of the few blacks in Liberty to own his own land, and always wore a hat, which he considered a sign of self-respect.

He was not the type to seek out trouble - Robert Moses says it found him.

"He was at the wrong place at the wrong time. He saw something that happened and he was deeply disturbed and affected by that. And so he had a basic life decision to make," Moses explained.

On Sept. 25, 1961, Allen was walking past an old cotton gin when he saw something that likely got him killed.

Produced by Graham Messick and Sumi AggarwalAllen witnessed a powerful state legislator by the name of E.H. Hurst shoot and kill an unarmed black man named Herbert Lee. Allen told his friends and family that he and other eyewitnesses had been pressured into lying about the shooting, and to saying that it was self-defense. Later, Allen decided that he needed to tell the truth.

One of the people Allen told it to was Julian Bond, who was trying to register black voters in Mississippi for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He would later become a legendary civil rights leader.

"This was not a self-defense action by the state representative. This was out and out murder. That's all it was. But Louis Allen agreed to lie about that," Bond said.

Asked why he thinks Allen lied about it, Bond said, "He lied because he was in fear of his life. If he had implicated a powerful white man in a murder of a black man, that he was risking his life."

"Did you encourage him to tell the truth?" Kroft asked.

"I tried to encourage him to tell the truth, but you know, it was like saying, 'Why don't you volunteer to be killed?'" Bond replied.

But Allen's wife would later testify that "his conscience was clipping him" and he decided to tell FBI agents and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights what really happened at the cotton gin. A document from FBI files says, "Allen changed his story" and "expressed fear that he might be killed."

He asked for protection, but none was provided. Almost immediately, word began circulating in Liberty that Allen was prepared to change his testimony.

"He was threatened as a result of the fact that he was going to change his statement and that he did change his statement," Deitle said.

She said the FBI was notified of those threats.

Asked if the bureau did anything, Deitle said, "Yes. We referred that to local law enforcement authorities."

"It's certainly possible to conclude that local law enforcement people were the ones behind the threats?" Kroft asked.

"There is a theory out there that that speaks to that. Yes," she replied.

In fact, it has been the prevailing theory for some time, although the FBI cannot officially confirm it. There is a 1961 reference in the FBI file to a report that "Allen was to be killed and the local sheriff was involved in the plot to kill him."

And "60 Minutes" found a 1962 letter from Robert Moses to Assistant Attorney General John Doar, alleging the same thing: "They're after him in Amite [County]," it says, and makes reference to "a plot by the sheriff and seven other men."

"He was afraid of the sheriff's department," Kroft remarked.

"I think he was, yes," Deitle said.

"And I think he was afraid of the Klan, although they seemed to be sort of the same thing in Liberty at this time," Kroft remarked.

"I'm not sure I can say that," she replied.

Julian Bond was less circumspect: "The law enforcement, you suspected they were members. If you wanted to be a mayor, a city councilman, a county commissioner, the sheriff, if you wanted to be on the legislature, you had to have some connection with the Klan."

And in the Amite County Sheriff's Department, the person with the best connection was Deputy Sheriff Daniel Jones. His father was the "Exalted Cyclops" of the local Klan, and Jones himself, according to an FBI document "60 Minutes" found, was suspected of being a Klan member.

Jones, who is alive and still resides in Liberty, was recently visited by FBI agents who wanted him to take a lie detector test.

"What was he like?" Kroft asked Louis Allen's son, Hank.

"Well, mean," he replied.

Hank Allen was 17 years old when his father was killed and he remembers Jones as his main tormentor. He says he watched Jones harass and repeatedly arrest his father on trumped-up charges, and one night beat him outside their home.

"And he had handcuffed him, told him he was under arrest. So Daddy asked for his hat. Told Daddy, 'No, you can't go get your hat.' Daddy said, 'Well, my son is on the porch, can he bring me my hat?' He drawed back, he took a flashlight, and he struck my daddy, and broke his jawbone. Handcuffed," Hank Allen told Kroft.

When he got out of jail, Louis Allen did something that was unheard of for a black man in Mississippi: he went to the FBI and lodged a complaint against Deputy Sheriff Jones and testified before a federal grand jury.

The case was thrown out, and the situation in Liberty continued to deteriorate.

"They stopped sellin' Daddy gas in the town. They stopped buyin' his logs. They just more or less just tried to black ball him," Hank Allen remembered.

"It got to the point, the harassment and just him not being able to survive in Liberty that he decided to leave and to go work in another state. And it's the night before he is due to leave that he is killed," Cynthia Deitle explained.

Allen was ambushed on a cold night in January 1964, after getting out of his truck to open the cattle gate that led to his property. His son, Hank, was the one who found him.

"I didn't know why he would park the truck in the middle of the driveway and leave it like that. And I climbed up in the truck. The headlights was real dim. And when I went to step down out the truck, I stepped on something. And that's when I stepped on my daddy's hand. He was lying up under the truck," Hank Allen remembered.

He was killed with two blasts of deer shot to the head. The investigating officer was none other than the newly-elected sheriff, Daniel Jones, who Hank said made it clear to the family, why his father had been murdered.

"He told my mom that if Louis had just shut his mouth, that he wouldn't be layin' there on the ground. He wouldn't be dead," Hank Allen said.

Asked if he thinks Sheriff Jones did it, Hank Allen told Kroft, "Yes, indeed. By all means. If he didn't do it, he was the entrepreneur of it."

Jones told the newspapers he was unable to find a single clue.

"How would you characterize the investigation that Sheriff Jones conducted?" Kroft asked Deitle.

"He did not develop any fingerprints, any physical evidence and he never developed any suspects," she replied.

In fact, it's not clear that anyone investigated Allen's murder until 1994, when Plater Robinson, a historian at the Southern Institute at Tulane University, began digging into it.

"From day one in Liberty, people told me that Daniel Jones and a colored man killed Louis Allen," Robinson said.

Robinson has spent 17 years combing through archives and tracking down people to interview. One of them was an elderly preacher named Alfred Knox. Knox told Robinson in a 1998 tape-recorded conversation that his son-in-law, Archie Weatherspoon, was with Sheriff Daniel Jones when Allen was murdered.

"My son-in-law went with him," Knox said in the recorded interview.

"To kill Louis Allen?" Robinson asked.

"To kill Louis Allen," Knox said. "He didn't know where he was goin' till he got in the car. And he said 'Would you pull the trigger? Would you shoot him?' He said, 'No, I ain't gonna do it.' That what my son-in-law said. 'I ain't gonna shoot him. You come out here to kill him, you kill him.' So he killed him."

Both Knox and his son-in-law took their stories to the grave. But Robinson says the answer to who killed Allen can still be found in Liberty. "A lot of people are dead. But there are still a number of significant people still alive," he told Kroft.

"Like who, besides Sheriff Jones?" Kroft asked.

"Well, Charles Ravencraft, he lives down the road. And he's quite healthy," Robinson said.

We found Ravencraft at the Liberty Drug Store presiding over a coffee klatch of old-timers, some of whom were around when Allen was murdered.

"People in this area, they just don't do much talking," Ravencraft told Kroft.

For years, Ravencraft was sergeant-at-arms of the Mississippi legislature. And at the time of Allen's murder, he was vice president of the "Americans for the Preservation of the White Race" in Liberty, a front group for the Ku Klux Klan.

Ravencraft indicated that he hadn't lost much sleep over Allen's murder, and told us he had no idea who killed him. "No I don't. He lived a lot longer than I thought he'd a lived. That's the kinda fella he was, he was a little overbearing. I don't think that civil rights had anything to do with it," he told Kroft.

Winbourne Sullivan wasn't around when Allen was killed, but he ran the Liberty Drug Store for 36 years. "I think there are people who know what happened and who did it, but they're not willin' to talk about it. And they won't talk about it. You'll never find out," he said.

They told us they don't see much of former Sheriff Daniel Jones these days. He spends most of his time on his property, just off the state highway.

We decided to approach him with our cameras concealed, on the off-chance he might give something up. After waiting for a half-an-hour on the porch, he rolled up in an all-terrain vehicle with his wife.

"My name is Steve Kroft. We're from '60 Minutes' in New York. We're down here working on a story, on an old case of yours, and was wondering if you'd have some time to talk to us about?" Kroft asked.

"No, sir, I don't believe so," Jones replied.

"You don't think so?" Kroft asked.

"No, sir," Jones said.

"The Louis Allen case?" Kroft asked.

"Yeah, I know what you're talking about," Jones replied.

Jones was polite and cordial, said he didn't want to talk, but he kept on talking.

"There was some bad blood between you and Louis, right?" Kroft asked.

"There was not no bad blood between us. Apparently, I'm talking more than I need to, but the truth sometimes has a way of slipping out if you try to keep it covered up," Jones said.

When asked if he was in the Klan, Jones told Kroft, "Well, I won't answer that. I take the Fifth on that. "

Jones confirmed that the FBI had already been there asking some of the same questions.

"I told you I don't care to discuss it, and you just keep coming with your educated approach," Jones told Kroft.

"No, it's not my educated approach. Look, you haven't told me to get off your property. Just answer me one last question," Kroft said.

"Okay, be sure it's the last one," Jones said.

"Can you look me in the eye and say you weren't involved in it?" Kroft asked.

"No sir, I wasn't involved in it," Jones said.

"Well, you know, sheriff, you could clear this up with a lie detector test," Kroft pointed out.

"Well, then it ain't gonna get cleared up," Jones said.

"The theory that Sheriff Jones killed Louis Allen has been in the public domain for quite some time. The FBI would be remiss in our duties if we did not pursue that theory," Cynthia Deitle told Kroft.

And it's still just a theory - a circumstantial case based on motive, suspicions, hearsay and the words of dead people. There's no forensic evidence, no murder weapon, no eyewitnesses and only one FBI agent working the case, part-time.

At a town hall meeting in nearby Baton Rouge, Deitle tried to shake out some new leads and enlist journalists, activists and students to help the FBI solve the murder.

"Why are you relying on reporters and professors? This is the most powerful law enforcement agency in the country. You have subpoena power," Kroft pointed out.

"We do. We have resources that we could bring to bear on any case," Deitle said.

"Why don't you bring 'em?" Kroft asked.

"They have been. But I've learned in these cases that a witness, a family member may be more comfortable talking to you then she would be talking to me," she replied.

For Hank Allen, the time to solve his father's killing was 47 years ago.

He believes the people who know what happened - black and white - would rather forget it now and that the wall of silence and the passage of time have granted immunity to those he thinks are responsible.

"Here's a guy, goes on livin' his normal life, enjoyin' life. But they feel as though we're doin' somethin' wrong by sayin' somethin' about the murder. In other words, 'You should be quiet about that. That was in the past.' Well, it's still in my present, and in my future. I have to look at this every day," he told Kroft.